Leftist Identity Maintenance

One of my political activities is trying to get the liberals who read this site to think deeper about their politics, which often means annoying people, yes. And yes, you are a racist if you move to send your kids to the “good schools” or send them to private schools to avoid the public schools. And yes, Biden staying on no matter what was perhaps the single most ridiculous position one could take after the first debate, a take so obviously ridiculous that anyone who believed in it should basically reconsider their entire approach to electoral politics.

American schools have never meaningfully desegregated and white liberals who just want their kids to get "the best education" in the suburbs or private school are just a big a problem as white supremacists in 1957 Arkansas. https://t.co/g5v3bOdkPo

— Erik Loomis (@ErikLoomis) September 24, 2024

What I don’t talk about here is one of my other political activities, which is doing the same thing to the left on social media. Nope, people don’t like me there either, especially right now, since I am repeatedly telling them that refusing to vote for Harris because of Gaza is The Politics of Nothing. Like literally, what is that going to accomplish? You don’t have to tell me that Israel is committing genocide. It’s objectively true. And is the US complicit in that? Yes. But what would helping Donald Trump get elected do to make this better? Nothing at all. Moreover, there is zero evidence that leftists withholding their votes or voting for third parties makes Democrats move to the left. What it does is make the left unreliable and pushes Democrats to more stable voting blocs.

The real problem on the left is a lot of screaming but a lack of organizing. That’s what I thought of repeatedly while reading this Lissy Romanow piece on the Squad, as she looks back to realize that the actual voters in these districts didn’t really have any desire for some kind of “revolution.” We will lead what that words means to modern leftists behind for the moment.

Biden had won the presidency, and Democrats the House and Senate. Under this Democratic trifecta, the Squad was no longer the leading voice of opposition under Trump but instead a junior partner in a governing coalition with the establishment Democrats whom they had, until that point, roundly criticized. For some on the left, the Squad’s shift from opposition to governance was undesirable because it exposed them to compromises with the center that would sully their program. For the realignment strategists, however, this was the goal all along: by becoming a junior partner, the Squad would co-govern with the center and set in motion a “policy feedback loop,” in which progressive policy would beget support for progressive politicians and, in turn, lead to more progressive policy. In the process, some centrists would become more progressive, and those who didn’t would be challenged in future primary elections. Becoming a junior partner was a step on the path to becoming, one day, the senior partner.

This vision was challenged in September 2021, when the House voted on $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, supplemental to the annual $3.3 billion that the U.S. government provides to Israel. Against the recommendations of Justice Democrats staffers, AOC and Bowman deviated from the rest of the Squad: AOC voted “present,” effectively abstaining, and Bowman voted for the funding. Many on the left—especially those who saw the Squad as their representatives in Congress—were bewildered: what was a left faction of the Democratic Party without commitments to the Palestinian cause? When questioned about the vote, Bowman explained, “It’s important for me to make sure I represent everyone within my district—not just some people within my district.” Bowman was torn between being a spokesperson for a national leftist movement and an elected representative of a decidedly non-leftist district. Was it the Squad’s job to shift public opinion and persuade voters to support Palestinian freedom—and the left’s broader agenda—or ours?

If the Iron Dome vote surfaced confusion about what the left should do when the Squad strayed from our agenda, the trajectory of the Build Back Better bill—a significant part of the compromise brokered between Bernie’s and Biden’s bases in 2020—revealed confusion about what to do when the Squad advocated for it. In late 2021, the bill died in the Senate when Joe Manchin refused to vote for it. In contrast to the roughly forty members of the Freedom Caucus in the Republican Party, the Squad had only six; in actuality, a former Justice Democrats staffer lamented, it was less a junior partner in a governing coalition than a sub-group of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. When the CPC folded on blocking the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill—the major point of leverage progressives had to push Manchin to support Build Back Better—only the Squad voted against it. The political benefits of this maneuver were limited, but the costs would prove to be immense.

Data for Progress showed that the majority of voters supported the proposal to invest $1.75 trillion over the coming decade to fund care for seniors and people with disabilities, expand Medicare coverage, and extend the child tax credit—but just because voters liked it didn’t mean they would spontaneously protest to defend it. The Squad didn’t try to organize anyone on the outside to fight for Build Back Better, but Sunrise summoned all the energy it could, launching a hunger strike to demand executive action from Biden: “We will continue to sit starving outside the White House everyday until you use your power as elected president of the United States to deliver your mandate for bold, and transformative climate action with justice and for jobs,” the strikers wrote in an open letter. It was a valiant effort, but not enough to make an impact. Once it became clear that Manchin would not strike a deal on Build Back Better—and that Biden would not try to move him through rousing public speeches or bargains behind closed doors—the strikers went home.

At the moment when we needed mass organizing to create a popular groundswell for the most ambitious governing agenda of our lifetimes, hardly anyone was in the streets. The base’s energy was a limited if renewable resource, surging in movement moments and crashing in their wake. The Squad had been elected on a hope for political revolution, but it was missing a standing army.

When Build Back Better resurfaced in diminished form as the Inflation Reduction Act and ultimately passed in 2022, even those on the left who acknowledged it as the largest investment in renewable energy in U.S. history were more relieved than celebratory. The Squad and its supporters had moved Biden to the left, but the Democrats still lacked the governing majority needed to pass a truly transformative agenda. The movement had helped to create the political will for industrial policy inside the Democratic Party and shifted the common sense about the role of government in mitigating the effects of climate change, exactly as Sunrise had intended. But the industrial policy that was ultimately signed into law saw the role of government as one of subsidizing profits for green technology in the private sector and preparing domestic supply chains for conflict with China—not replacing fossil fuels or ensuring public ownership of clean energy. The passage of the IRA showed that we had moved the Democratic Party’s agenda in ways that were unimaginable five years earlier, but the paradigm of private investment, the primacy of geopolitical concerns over ecological ones, and the influence of fossil-fuel capital remained wholly intact.

I think this is fundamentally correct. I see a lot of talk from smart leftists (yes, they exist) about how things are bad for the left right now. I’m like, really? But then you see a lot of not smart leftists who call AOC a huge sell-out who sucks and is the worst. These people are all over social media. And I think what you see is a certain type of activist who fundamentally despises liberals and the Democratic Party. We know this type. That’s their core politics. So they don’t want the kind of wins that AOC and others have provided in the policy gains of the Biden administration. No, they want to shove a pie in Nancy Pelosi’s face.

Meanwhile, the deep-seated individualism that make us all functional neoliberals now (in the sense of the privatization of political action; it’s me me me me me and solidarity means you support me right now without any reciprocation) means that the most these people can do is to change the conversation. There’s value in that, sure, but the left undermines its effectiveness this way. When I wrote my recent piece in Boston Review about the present state of relations between labor and environmentalists, I told a story about what has happened in Rhode Island, where major gains have taken place.

This idea is especially important when it comes to the idea of a “just transition,” which the book’s editors define as “a transformation of the extractive fossil fuel economy to a healthy, regenerative, equitable, and democratic economy.” Patrick Crowley, secretary-treasurer of Rhode Island’s AFL-CIO, has an essay in the book on this subject. In 2020, shortly after the presidential election, both labor and greens sat down to strategize, creating a group called Climate Jobs Rhode Island. But as it turns out, the two groups had very different ideas about what exactly a just transition around “climate jobs” would look like.

For the environmental organizations, a just transition meant environmental justice—pushing for goals like climate resiliency and carbon neutrality. For unions, a just transition meant the continuation (and expansion) of union jobs. These two goals can converge, of course, but they are not the same thing. Unions are concerned with working-class communities but serve their own members first, wherever they live. Environmentalists generally do want good jobs for people, but just moving dirty industry out of poor communities of color does not lead to the kind of jobs that will provide economic emancipation for them (nor are those jobs necessarily union jobs). This is the fundamental tension.

What it takes to bridge these differences is an old answer to many questions but one that we often forget to do: organizing. And organizing means listening—precisely what environmentalists and labor didn’t do in the decades they mostly operated independently.

Well, that’s only part of the story. The other part of it is that when labor and green organizations came together to craft a legislative plan for the state, much of which has been implemented, the Sunrise Movement folks balked at the last second. The reason was that they hated the state’s Democratic Party and wanted to challenge the most progressive legislators in the state for obscure reasons around a guy named Matt Brown, one of our leftists who is a massive egoist. So basically the AFL-CIO and the large environmental organizations simply kicked Sunrise out of the conversation. They couldn’t play with others. Even after they had won unprecedented gains, the idea of being on a team with the LIBZZZ was unacceptable.

In short, we live in a remarkable moment when the left actually has made big policy gains that we’ve seen at the state and national level. But they refuse to accept it because it would impact their identity. For this, I refer back to Paul’s post yesterday. I agree that motivated ignorance is an identity. But so is Dem hating on the left. To make alliances with mainstream liberals, even if they win on the substance, is just too far for a lot of leftists to go because it would impact their personal identity of Dem hating. So they win and they elect people and they get policy gains and their response is to whine about AOC and refuse to support Harris for raison d’election.